Our ideas about architecture -- how to do it, who can do it, and what it can do -- cannot be extracted from a social and technological context. In this book, Yanni Loukissas examines contemporary explanations of architecture in the context of a new culture of simulation developing around information technologies. The book is organized around the accounts of professional designers engaged in a high-stakes competition to redefine architecture in the context of computer simulation. Designers of a range of architectural systems, including facades, acoustical treatments, mechanical systems, and fire safety measures are challenging traditional practices in order to accommodate increasingly sophisticated simulation tools as well as new professional spaces for themselves. By illustrating how practices of simulation inform the social relationships and conceptual distinctions that define the way contemporary architecture is both designed and experienced, the book examines the cultural transformations taking place in architectural practice today.
Table of Contents:
Preface 1. Introducing the Electronic Brain 2. Cultures of Simulation 3. "Special Men" and Universal Machines 4. How Do Simulations Know? 5. Towards a Pluralistic Formalism 6. Designers in Dialog 7. Human, Machine, and Environment
About the Author :
Yanni Alexander Loukissas is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society (STS) at MIT. He has also been a Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Architecture at Cornell University. He holds an SM and a PhD in Design and Computation from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), as well as a BArch from Cornell University.
Review :
"This book is more than a conversation starter; it is a conversation changer. A designer and an ethnographer, Loukissas provides a rare dual vision on how simulation changes how we build and think about building. Elegant. Sophisticated. A must-read across a range of fields in science and technology studies and design."
Sherry Turkle, Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
"This book is more than a conversation starter; it is a conversation changer. A designer and an ethnographer, Loukissas provides a rare dual vision on how simulation changes how we build and think about building. Elegant. Sophisticated. A must-read across a range of fields in science and technology studies and design." – Sherry Turkle, Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of theSocial Studies of Science and Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
"One of the things that often gets missed in stories of technological change is the way that it often accompanies changes in professional relations, and that's something that Co-Designers illustrates beautifully"
Paul Dourish, professor, Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California at Irvine, USA
